India is chairing an 11-nation BRICS in 2026, and the summit it is hosting has turned into a test of how much bigger the bloc can get before consensus breaks down GK Today. Pakistan and Bangladesh are both seeking membership; China backs their entry, while India is holding back WION.

BRICS runs on consensus. Every one of the eleven current members, India included, can quietly block a newcomer without ever lodging a formal objection India Today. That gives New Delhi leverage over Islamabad's bid that it holds in almost no other multilateral forum.

Hypothesis: India lets China champion Pakistani and Bangladeshi membership because New Delhi controls the actual gate. The bilateral India-China reset analysts expect to continue at this summit Chatham House lets Beijing bank goodwill in Islamabad and Dhaka at no real cost, since it can back an enlargement it knows India will quietly veto. Supporting this: the reported split — China backing expansion, India staying cautious — is what you'd expect if both capitals were managing the file bilaterally while performing rivalry inside the bloc. Against it: China's support may be sincere, aimed at diluting India's weight inside BRICS by adding Pakistan, a state that would reliably side with Beijing — in which case the reset and the expansion push work at cross purposes, not in tandem.

India's own framing of its chairship — built around four pillars it calls resilience, innovation, cooperation and sustainability DD India and pitched at home as leadership on Global South prosperity organiser.org — treats a wider membership as more legitimacy for a bloc that claims to speak for the developing world.

It also assumes the club is holding together well enough to widen. One Indian commentary already frames this chairmanship as an effort to "put BRICS back together" INSIGHTS IAS, language that concedes the bloc is already unwieldy before anyone adds a live India-Pakistan rivalry.

Indian coverage of the summit now frames it as no longer just a developing-country affair, because the United States is watching Fortune India — a striking admission that BRICS now reads, in Washington, as a rival rule-writing project, not a developing-country talking shop. What to watch: whether Pakistan's application gets a real slot on the summit agenda, still being finalized Business Standard, or dies quietly in pre-summit consultations that never make the communiqué.